1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to multimedia document presentations and more particularly to a system for automatically generating platform-independent formatting object descriptions from SGML documents and non-textual media sources which can then be used to create card-based multimedia presentation documents.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Traditionally, hypermedia presentations are interactively designed and manually created with hypermedia authoring tools. Various commercial hypermedia authoring tools adopt different interactive authoring paradigms but they are limited in supporting the automated generation of card-based presentation from existing multimedia document sources in large scale. The representative presentation authoring tools are summarized as follows.
PowerPoint from Microsoft is based on a structure-oriented model and supports hierarchical information content authoring in a 2D layout. Many commercial word processing tools follow this authoring model. Documents are often developed in terms of hierarchical structures such as book, pages or slides, sections, subsections, etc., and WYSWIG user interfaces are provided to support structure editing and issue formatting commands interactively.
Authorware from Macromedia and IconAuthor from AimTech are based on a flowchart model and use icons representing events such as audio or video, if-then functions, branching and hyperlinks in a linear progression like flowchart control. Content editors to assign real media files and properties to each icon could be used. This model provides high-level program control and global ordering of information presentation.
Director from Macromedia, based on a time-line model, displays media sequences as tracks and specializes in synchronizing events. It can be used to create high-level multimedia presentations.
Multimedia Toolbook from Asymetrix, based on an object-oriented model with scripting capability, provides more support of complex interaction behavior. Users can interactively enter document content (in multimedia objects) and define object properties including various formatting commands and scripts for object behavior. This authoring tool allows the user to get to a lower-level control of object and system behavior with script commands.